Disappeared News

Thursday, November 06, 2014

“Hawaii, meanwhile, has a long history of terrible polling, perhaps because of the state’s demographic makeup. Between 1998 and 2012, polls of gubernatorial and Senate elections there missed the final margin by an average of almost 12 points, the largest error of any state but Wyoming, according to the FiveThirtyEight database.”

by Larry Geller

I figured I’d mosey over to fivethirtyeight.com to see how Nate Silver’s predictions worked out, but I soon tripped over a couple of mentions about Hawaii’s lousy polling.

Who knew? I don’t recall much self-criticism in the local media. The article at the right, Hawaii: Where good polling goes to die, ran in the Washington Post. So much of the rest of the nation knew this about us, but we remained ignorant.

This is especially a problem given that many of the state's big Democratic primaries pit a white candidate against an Asian American one. Advertiser polling in 2002 and 2010 showed a better picture for the Asian American candidates in those races than was probably the case, while Civil Beat's 2012 poll skewed heavily toward the white candidate, Case.